Science Art: Ventricose Cuttlefish, probably by Charles Knight
Click to embiggen A close-up from another page of Charles Knight’s Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature. This may be mistitled – other creatures on the […]
Science Art: Body-centered cubic (bcc) unit cell of iron, 2009
If you were curious about the crystalline structure of iron mentioned in the last post, here it is — a molecul…
Read moreScience Art: MOON: For the Benefit of Humanity, 2023
It’s a poster made by NASA for lunar exploration, showing some landers, space stations, and sample-taking equip…
Read moreScience Art: Bubble chamber with colour enhanced tracks, 2026
This is a CERN image from January 6, 2026, showing something that happened in the 1960s, but enhanced for 21st-…
Read moreScience Art: Dissection of Asterias rubens, by Hans Hillewaert.
Starfish anatomy.
If you want to know the parts, according to Dutch Wikipedia, they are:
Read moreLegend
1 Arm
2…
Science Art: Jupiter's Family of Comets, 1898
This is a diagram from A New Astronomy For Beginners, a textbook that’s about a century and a quarter old, or a…
Read moreSONG: Your Catalogue
SONG: “Your Catalogue”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: NBC News, “New wild cat species is ide…
Read moreZeppelin reborn
The Telegraph heralds the future fleet of mighty airships: Hybrid Air Vehicles has built a scale prototype of what will soon be the largest flying […]
Bringing down the sun.
Science Daily has the skinny on cheaper solar power: Stanford engineers have figured out how to simultaneously use the light and heat of the sun […]
Gorilla glass!
The Christian Science Monitor loves primates. On the heels of the flying squirrel discovery, they’re analyzing the economic ramifications of “gorilla glass”: Two to three […]
Need to bother your monkey? Try flying squirrels!
It’s really hard to beat the Christian Science Monitor’s headline on this story…. Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts: “Human evolution occurred alongside primate […]
Fare thee well, Triceratops.
They came for Pluto. They came for Brontosaurus. And now, BoingBoing reports, they’ve come for Triceratops: maybe we should be calling it torosaurus now, I’m […]
Science Art: Seals, from The Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature.
Click to embiggen Seals and seal hunters, from Charles Knight’s Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature, exact publication date unknown but currently accessible at archive.org. They […]
The mosquito conundrum: Why not kill ’em all?
Nature wades into the controversy, asking scientists what would really happen if we killed all the mosquitoes: A stronger argument for keeping mosquitoes might be […]
Snail spit kills pain.
I have a vague memory of writing a story back in the 1990s about researchers trying to figure out how to use lethal cone snail […]
Super-scum. Again.
This is more covering-the-coverage than flogging a new discovery, but the New York Times is keeping tabs on the process of turning pond scum into […]
Teen motherhood: Evolutionary strategy.
There’s a whole shovel-load of politics wrapped up in this New Scientist report on the evolutionary effects of poverty on human reproduction: There is no […]
Science Art: Venus and the Ark, by Anne Sexton
The missile to launch a missile was almost a secret. Two male Ph.D.’s were picked and primed to fill it and one hundred carefully counted […]
SONG: nobody else can hear
SONG: “nobody else can hear”. (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: “Super squid sex organ discovered”, BBC News, 7 July 2010, […]
How NASA finds oil.
Unfortunately, as NPR reveals, we’re not talking about the kind that’s still safely underground: The NASA Earth Observatory explains that since ocean waters are never […]
X in uniform.
MAPS has published a study confirming that MDMA really does work in treating post-traumatic stress disorder: Participants treated with a combination of MDMA and psychotherapy […]